The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between national culture and ethical decision making. Established theories of ethics and moral development are reviewed and a culture-based model of ethical decision making in organizations is derived. Although the body of knowledge in both cross-cultural management and ethics is well documented, researchers have failed to integrate the influence of cultural values into the ethical decision-making paradigm. A conceptual understanding of how managers from different nations make decisions about highly ethical (...) issues will provide business ethics researchers with a sound theoretical foundation upon which future empirical inquiry can be based. (shrink)

The current debate as to whether the natural environment should be accorded stakeholder status involves an assumption that it is in some way ‘different’ from other stakeholders, requiring favourable discriminatory treatment. Essentially it is regarded as passive, requiring regulatory agencies to represent its interests or the wider public to demand its protection on the occasion of, for example, oil spills that leave wildlife in a visibly distressed state. But the natural environment does not have ‘consciousness’ as do traditional classes of (...) stakeholders such as employees, shareholders and contractors, nor does it negotiate in markets over the price at which it sells its output in the way that a trader haggles with potential buyers. This paper proposes that in the context of financial markets the natural environment possesses stakeholder status, founded upon the essentiality of ecosystem stability for their proper functioning and the structuring of instruments traded on them. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to describe the link between financial performance and the level of sustainability. In a novel approach, the paper classifies firms based on past financial success to address a potentially reciprocal relationship. For the groups of better and worse performing firms and for the entire sample, the above link is then tested, also accounting for non‐linearity in the relationship. We show that environmental management system (EMS) implementation as a proxy for a firm's sustainability level is (...) only positively associated with the financial performance of financially well‐performing firms. Conversely, it has a negative association with the performance of less good firms. We show that this implies that firms cannot change from good to bad performance, and vice versa, solely through the implementation of an EMS, and also that the result remains when introducing non‐linearity in the link. Based on this result, we discuss implications for the direction of causality. (shrink)

This paper addresses a significant gap in the conceptualization of business ethics within different cultural influences. Though theoretical models of business ethics have recognized the importance of culture in ethical decision-making, few have examinedhow this influences ethical decision-making. Therefore, this paper develops propositions concerning the influence of various cultural dimensions on ethical decision-making using Hofstede''s typology.

The literature regarding social and environmental sustainability of business focuses primarily on rationales for adopting sustainability strategies and operational practices in support of that goal. In contrast, we examine sustainability from a perspective that has received far less research attention—attitudes that inform managerial decision-making. We develop a conceptual model that identifies six elemental categories of attitudes that can be held independently or aggregated to yield a meta-attitude representing the legitimacy of sustainability. Our model distinguishes among three types of internally held (...) attitudes and externally perceived subjective norms: pragmatic, moral, and cognitive. We propose a refinement of Ajzen's (In: Kuhl J, Beckmann J (eds) Action control: from cognition to behavior, 1985; Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 50:179-211, 1991) Theory of planned behavior (TPB) that incorporates these sub-categories of personal attitudes and subjective norms. Practical implications are discussed including how organizations considering adopting sustainability programs might use the model as a conceptual tool to help achieve and assess program success. (shrink)

In industries populated by small and medium enterprises, managers' good intentions frequently incur barriers to superior environmental performance (Tilley, Bus Strategy Environ 8:238-248, 1999). During the period when the U.S. wine industry was beginning to promote voluntary adoption of sound environmental practices, we examined managers' attitudes, norms, and perceptions of stakeholder pressures to assess their intentions to implement environmental management programs (EMP). We found that managers within the simple structures of these small and medium firms are responsive to attitudes, norms, (...) and pressures from internal stakeholders and that voluntarily established EMP increased the success of firms' implementation of energy conservation and recycling practices. Applications of our findings to future research on small and medium enterprises as well as direct practical applications of our results are discussed. (shrink)

The current debate as to whether the natural environment should be accorded stakeholder status involves an assumption that it is in some way ‘different’ from other stakeholders, requiring favourable discriminatory treatment. Essentially it is regarded as passive, requiring regulatory agencies to represent its interests or the wider public to demand its protection on the occasion of, for example, oil spills that leave wildlife in a visibly distressed state. But the natural environment does not have ‘consciousness’ as do traditional classes of (...) stakeholders such as employees, shareholders and contractors, nor does it negotiate in markets over the price at which it sells its output in the way that a trader haggles with potential buyers. This paper proposes that in the context of financial markets the natural environment possesses stakeholder status, founded upon the essentiality of ecosystem stability for their proper functioning and the structuring of instruments traded on them. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to describe the link between financial performance and the level of sustainability. In a novel approach, the paper classifies firms based on past financial success to address a potentially reciprocal relationship. For the groups of better and worse performing firms and for the entire sample, the above link is then tested, also accounting for non-linearity in the relationship. We show that environmental management system (EMS) implementation as a proxy for a firm's sustainability level is (...) only positively associated with the financial performance of financially well-performing firms. Conversely, it has a negative association with the performance of less good firms. We show that this implies that firms cannot change from good to bad performance, and vice versa, solely through the implementation of an EMS, and also that the result remains when introducing non-linearity in the link. Based on this result, we discuss implications for the direction of causality. (shrink)

Although there are suggestions that the environmental attitudes of men and of women differ, there have been few studies that study and evaluate these differences at the workplace. Given the claim of Ecofeminist writers about the environmental superiority of women's environmental attitudes, and the proclaimed need of business to change attitudes and behaviour with regard to the environment, this is a surprise. The paper is based on 1022 (37% from women) questionnaires which were collected in a U.K. pharmaceutical company, and (...) it compares the empirical results with environmental attitude archetypes, such as those prescribed by O'Riordan. However, the attitude clusters that were found do not correspond greatly with such theoretical modes of environmental ethics. Instead, it appears that women were more likely to be actively involved in environmental behaviour, and showed greater scepticism towards the role of technology in the search for solutions to environmental problems. In addition, men sought to a much greater extent a consistency between an environmental rationality and their behaviour. Men's attitudes were also much more influenced by their position in the organisational hierarchy. There were few significant differences across age groups. (shrink)